Saint Boniface

St. Boniface baptizing converts into the German Church; detail from a manuscript from Fulda Abbey, 10th-11th century; in the Staatsbibliothek Bamberg (MS. Lit. 1)Courtesy of the Staatsbibliothek Bamberg

Saint Boniface, Latin Bonifatius, original name Wynfrid or Wynfrith
(born c. 675, Wessex, England—died June 5, 754, Dokkum, Frisia [now in the Netherlands]; feast day June 5), English missionary and reformer, often called the apostle of Germany for his role in the Christianization of that country. Boniface set the church in Germany on a firm course of undeviating piety and irreproachable conduct. In his letters and in the writings of his contemporaries, he appears as a man of purpose and dedication, an innovator with a powerful though willful personality.

Boniface belonged to a noble family of Wessex, England. He received an excellent education in the Benedictine abbeys of Adescancastre (Exeter) and Nhutscelle (Nursling, between Winchester and Southampton) and became a Benedictine monk, being ordained priest at about age 30. From 716 to 722 he made two attempts to evangelize the Frisian Saxons on the Continent but was balked by their king, Radbod. On his return to England he learned that his abbot had died and that he had been elected in his stead—an honour he declined in favour of a second attempt at a missionary career. In 718 he accompanied a group of Anglo-Saxon pilgrims to Rome, where Pope Gregory II entrusted him with a mission to the pagans east of the Rhine, asking him only to use the Roman formula for baptism, rather than the Celtic, and to consult with Rome on major problems arising from his work. Gregory II changed Wynfrid’s name to Boniface. In the meantime, Radbod had died (719), and Boniface returned to Frisia to assist his countryman Bishop Willibrord in his missionary activities. In 722 he went to Hesse, where he established the first of many Benedictine monasteries as a means of consolidating his work.

So great was his success that he was called to Rome, where Gregory consecrated him a missionary bishop. The pope also provided him with a collection of canons (ecclesiastical regulations) and letters of recommendation to such important personages as Charles Martel, master of the Frankish kingdom, whose protection was essential to Boniface’s success. It was the pagan awe of Martel’s name that allowed Boniface to destroy the sacred oak of the Germanic god Thor at Geismar.

For 10 years (725–735) Boniface was active in Thuringia, converting pagans and renewing the faith of Christians who had been converted earlier by Irish missionaries, whose haphazard methods of evangelization were henceforth to be the bane of Boniface’s life. He met opposition, he said, “from ambitious and free-living clerics” whom he pursued relentlessly, even when they appealed to the popes. On a later occasion, Pope St. Zacharias was forced to moderate the zeal of Boniface, who requested not only excommunication but also solitary confinement for two “heretical” missionaries, Adalbert and Clement the Irishman—sentences that the pope avoided imposing by deliberate delay. Boniface’s handling of missionaries whose methods he deplored sheds light on his personality and temperament: he turned immediately to Rome, he expected prompt and ruthless action, and he seems at times to have been excessively severe in his judgments.

Boniface’s career was assisted in a unique and moving way by his brother and sister Benedictines from England. They supported him by gifts and encouraged him by their faithful love, expressed in letters that were delightful in their openness and humanity. Their final expression of love for him was to cast their lots with him in Germany, where they formed the nucleus of four monasteries that served as centres of civilized Christian life.

Ordered by Pope Gregory III (731–741) to organize the church in Bavaria, Boniface initially established four bishoprics there. His work had far-reaching political repercussions, for his Christianization of Bavaria paved the way for the ultimate incorporation of the country into the Carolingian empire. After 740 he added another see in Bavaria and also created three in central Germany. Aided by his new suffragan bishops—for such they were, in fact, though his appointment as archbishop of Mainz came later (751)—Boniface undertook the reform of the Frankish clergy and, wherever possible, of Irish missionaries. Between 740 and 745, five synods were convened for this purpose. In 747 a reforming council was held for the entire Frankish kingdom with the wholehearted collaboration of Carloman and Pippin, the sons and heirs of Charles Martel. Though Charles had protected Boniface, he had, at the same time, given church land to his magnates and used the discipline of the church as a means of taming recalcitrant Germanic tribes. Carloman and Pippin, on the other hand, made the decisions of the council of 747 binding in Frankish law.

Boniface’s life ended in martyrdom at the hands of a band of pagan Frisians, who killed him as he was reading the Scriptures to Christian neophytes on Pentecost Sunday. Boniface had asked to be buried at Fulda, the monastery he had entrusted (744) to his Bavarian disciple Sturmi. There his body rests in a magnificent baroque sarcophagus.

Organizer, educator, and reformer, Boniface profoundly influenced the course of intellectual, political, and ecclesiastical history in Germany and France throughout the Middle Ages. He unified the missionary movement by bringing it under the control of Rome. Through his monasteries, which furnished bishops and teachers for many generations, he significantly improved the quality of life in the Frankish kingdom.